… driving to work today I’m listening to a great recording of Billy Bragg playing at the Belcourt Theater in Nashville on April 17th… Billy tells a story about an imaginary Newport Folk Festival performance in 1959 where Buddy Holly and Woody Guthrie team up to perform “My Flying Saucer”, an electric “supersonic boogie”… at the end of the song I notice the personalized license plate of the little red Saturn car that I had been following, it reads “MY UFO”…
here’s a clip of the same story/song as performed in Chicago April 13th:
… while driving I’m usually totally lost in whatever music I’ve decided to listen to that day, and there’s nothing better than an external happening that is synchronized to the music… today it was while listening to “The Waterboys: Fisherman’s Blues Part Two”… I’m well into my journey during a driving rain storm and just finished listening to Bap Kennedy’s “Domestic Blues” that ends with “Dirty Old Town”, a favorite, the Waterboys start and I’m instantly absorbed… four songs in during “Too Close To Heaven” as the line “see those blue skies bursting right through the rain” is sung there is a break in the clouds with sunlight streaming in for a very brief time… then it’s back to grey skies and rain… towards the end of the song it repeats “smile for me baby”… “smile for me baby”…”smile for me baby”… …
